Street at Saracen’s Head has 7th slowest broadband in UK

Roger and Pam Langstaff spearheaded a campaign to bring high speed broadband to Saracen's Head. SG071217-311TW

A street at Saracen’s Head has the 7th slowest broadband speed in the whole of the UK according to uSwitch.com

Downloading a typical two hour film in Saltney Gate would take a staggering 16 hours and 10 minutes ... while it would be under five minutes in the UK’s quickest, Benford Avenue in Motherwell, Scotland.

Saltney Gate has the 7th lowest broadband speed of all streets in the UK. SG071217-308TW

Saltney Gate is the worst in the East Midlands, including Lincolnshire, with an average download of just 0.886Mbps (megabits per second).

One other Lincolnshire street figures in the 30 worst, Church Lane at Kirkby la Thorpe, near Sleaford, is 26th with a speed of 1.147Mbps.

Roger Langstaff and his parish councillor wife, Pam, say other streets in Saracen’s Head have poor speeds and 150 people, including 10 businesses, backed a petition for high speed broadband.

The couple, who live a short distance from Saltney Gate, say the village is linked to a broadband cabinet at Holbeach and a copper wire from that extends to their village.

Roger said: “I wouldn’t even try to download a film.”

Pam believes the village will be on high speed broadband by next August while Roger disagrees, saying he believes it will take longer but he can’t confirm anything because BT will no longer talk to him.

Agricultural engineers A Woods, who have a Claas dealership on Pipwell Gate, pay top dollar for a “shocking” Internet service.

Clive Woods says the firm deals with companies in Germany all the time and constantly apologises to customers for the slow Internet speed when ordering parts.

He said: “We can be sitting here for five minutes at least waiting to get through, which doesn’t sound long but in that five minutes you can have two more customers waiting. If you are paying top money, you want the service to go with it.”

BT and Lincolnshire County Council work together to provide broadband through the onlincolnshire programme and Saracen’s Head could wait up to two years before things improve.

Steve Brookes, Onlincolnshire programme manager, said: “We realise how important good broadband is these days. We’ve already brought better speeds to over 150,000 homes and businesses, and are currently working on a second phase of improvements, which will benefit a further 21,000 properties. That will mean that almost 97 per cent of Lincolnshire will have access to superfast speeds by the end of 2019. Saltney Gate and Church Lane are both included within the next phase of improvements, although the work is likely to be carried out in the later stages of the project.”

A BT spokesman told us: “BT remains committed to making faster download speeds as widely available across Lincolnshire, as quickly as possible. Around 90 per cent of homes and businesses already have access to superfast broadband, thanks to BT’s commercial rollout and our partnership with Lincolnshire County Council.

“Inevitably, there are some locations where fibre broadband has not yet reached, but the multi-million pound Onlincolnshire programme is playing a key role in extending the network even further, using a range of different technologies and approaches.

“The Saracen’s Head area is included in the latter stages of our partnership with the county council, and together we look forward to making superfast broadband available to local residents there during 2019.”